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Satellite Images Shows 1.5 Million Palestinians Now Shelter in Rafah

Some 1.5 million Palestinians are estimated to be now living in Rafah (Reuters)
Some 1.5 million Palestinians are estimated to be now living in Rafah (Reuters)
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Satellite Images Shows 1.5 Million Palestinians Now Shelter in Rafah

Some 1.5 million Palestinians are estimated to be now living in Rafah (Reuters)
Some 1.5 million Palestinians are estimated to be now living in Rafah (Reuters)

Satellite images revealed on Saturday the growing number of Palestinians sheltering in the southern Gaza border town of Rafah since the past October 7 attack.

Two photos, taken by the US company Planet Labs on Jan. 14 and Feb. 4, reveal that lands covered with trees have turned into a city of tents hosting the internally displaced Palestinians.

Roughly 80% of Gaza’s people have been displaced, and the territory has plunged into a humanitarian crisis with shortages of food and medical services.

Rafah is normally home to 280,000 people. But its population has swelled to over 1.4 million as Palestinians flee fighting, destruction and hunger elsewhere in the territory, according to the UN.

More than half of Gaza’s 2.3 million people are packed into Rafah, many after following Israeli evacuation orders that now cover two-thirds of the territory.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had asked the military to plan for the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people there ahead of a ground invasion.

Netanyahu did not provide details or a timeline, but the announcement set off panic and warnings from diplomats, AP said.

On Sunday, the bodies of 58 Palestinians killed in Israeli airstrikes arrived to Abu Youssef Al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah, according to the Palestinian Shehab News agency.

In a related development, the World Health Organization (WHO) said it was denied a mission Saturday to the Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, which has been besieged and coming under Israeli fire for three weeks.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO's director-general, said he was “deeply concerned about the safety of patients and health personnel due to the intensifying hostilities in the vicinity of the hospital.”

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Syrian Opposition Fighters Take the Homes of Assad's Officers

A family member waits for workers to move his family's belongings, following evacuation orders from factions of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), after Syria's Bashar Assad was ousted, on the outskirts of Damascus, in Syria, December 29, 2024. REUTERS/Amr Abdallah Dalsh
A family member waits for workers to move his family's belongings, following evacuation orders from factions of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), after Syria's Bashar Assad was ousted, on the outskirts of Damascus, in Syria, December 29, 2024. REUTERS/Amr Abdallah Dalsh
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Syrian Opposition Fighters Take the Homes of Assad's Officers

A family member waits for workers to move his family's belongings, following evacuation orders from factions of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), after Syria's Bashar Assad was ousted, on the outskirts of Damascus, in Syria, December 29, 2024. REUTERS/Amr Abdallah Dalsh
A family member waits for workers to move his family's belongings, following evacuation orders from factions of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), after Syria's Bashar Assad was ousted, on the outskirts of Damascus, in Syria, December 29, 2024. REUTERS/Amr Abdallah Dalsh

Families of military officers who served under Syria's ousted Bashar Assad are being evicted from their subsidized housing at a compound outside Damascus to make way for victorious former opposition fighters and their families, residents and fighters there said.

The Muadamiyat al-Sham compound housing hundreds of people in over a dozen buildings is one of several such areas set aside for officers under Assad's rule, according to Reuters.

As the military is being restructured around the former opposition forces, with Assad-era officers demobilized, the evictions from military housing are not a surprise.

But their rapid replacement in the accommodation by fighters who spent years in impoverished, rural opposition-held territory shows the sudden reversal of fortune for supporters of each side in the conflict.

Names of factions under the main victorious group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which captured the capital on Dec. 8, are scrawled in spray paint on the entrances to buildings, apparently marking them out for fighters from each entity.

Three fighters at the compound, four women who have been residing there and a local official providing documents to those leaving said officers' families had been given five days to go.

“We will start moving our children's schools, starting our lives over. I am very sad, my heart is broken, it's our lives, my children's lives,” said Budour Makdid, 38, the wife of a former military intelligence officer living in Muadamiyat al-Sham.

Makdid's husband, who has signed papers recognizing the new authorities and handed over his gun, has already returned to his family home in Latakia province, a former Assad stronghold, and Makdid and their children would join him there, she said.

Like other families leaving the area, she needed a document from the municipal authorities to say the family was leaving the accommodation and giving permission to remove their belongings.

Local administrator Khalil al-Ahmad, 69, said families had started approaching him several days ago seeking the document and that around 200 requests for one had been made so far.

Ahmad said he had not been officially contacted by the new administration about the change, and was only made aware of it when residents began to ask him for the documents.

Displaced

Any sign of how Syria's new administration intends to handle former Assad officers, as well as property rights, will be closely watched in a country where millions of people have been displaced since civil war erupted in 2011.

Earlier this month, HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa was filmed requesting the residents of his family's former home in Damascus to leave and allow his own family to move back.

Some former military families living near the Muadamiyat al-Sham compound but not in the subsidized units from which officers are being evicted are also leaving.

Eidye Zaitoun, 52, was packing her belongings into black plastic bags as she prepared to leave her two-room apartment for the coast. She said her son in the military had moved to the coast too and there was no reason for her to stay.

HTS fighters at the compound were not sympathetic, according to Reuters.